2006: The End? - December

The indie/garage rock genre was losing it's grip on the charts by December 2006. I count just 6 from the genre. Given the lack of decent tunes from that genre it's no big loss and true to form it collectively scores zero points.

What is more dominant in December is Pop Rock which is essentially pop music with guitars. Think McFly, Pink and former Busted member Matt Willis. Listen to enough of that music and you'll be begging for indie to return. Needless to say it's zero for all those records too.

The most likely source of points though is dance music so lets look there. We have "The Cure & The Cause" by Fish Go Deep which is decent and gets full marks. I can only find half points for Sharam with "PATT (Party All The Time)". I like Sharam but find this a bit cheesy for my liking, but I don't mind it. Likewise it was just half marks for Faithless with "Bombs", not bad but doesn't really do anything for me.

Micky Modelle was a guilty pleasure with his debut, but his follow up "Over You" is a step too far. Cascada are just plain dreadful with their euro cheese remake of "Truly Madly Deeply".

Then we have Queen vs the Miami Project with a dance version of "Another One Bites The Dust" which isn't great. Finally the 2 females from Big Brovaz make their debut as Booty Luv with "Boogie 2nite" which is dance music for people not into dance music.

In the rap and R&B world we have the best record for December which is "That's That Shit" by Snoop Dogg and R Kelly. I remember at the time thinking these were both people you could rely on for a decent record and they delivered the goods. 

Nelly Furtado had her 3rd single of the year "All Good Things (Come To An End)" and it's the 3rd to get full marks. Also getting 3 out of 3 is Red Hot Chili Peppers with "Snow (Hey Ho)". I do remember thinking at the time that both of them were doing the best mainstream music of the moment.

That just leaves the worst record which goes to Katie Price & Peter Andre with their cover of  "A Whole New World". I don't think that one needs an explanation.

Here's a list of the records with the best on top, worst at the bottom and the good ones in green, OK ones in amber and rubbish ones in red (and in no particular order):

Score: 11%

Here's a look at the chart:

I think we can conclude that the charts didn't just die over night, it was a gradual demise. 2005 was the year it was in gradual decline and 2006 was just poor throughout the year really.

I chose to measure each month as a percent to try and take the quantity of hits out of the equation as much as I could because I knew how much it could vary. We've had as many as 65 and as few as 20 hits in a month. The best actual score in a month we had was 15.5 which is almost impossible to achieve if there's just 20 hits to choose from. 

However as listeners we're more concerned about how much good music is out there rather than what the proportion is. If you've heard 1 good song this month and 3 good songs last month, you're more likely to say last month was 3 times as good than last month was equally as good because I heard 3 times as many songs. On that basis I thought I should plot the actual scores too:

This does paint 2006 to clearly be a worse year than 2005. It has raised another question though. The lowest we can score is zero and we've not done that yet. Surely there will come a time when there will be a zero scoring month.

Only one thing for it, join me next week for 2007: The End?